Iit's Blueprint For The Future

An Effort To Build A World-class Campus Center Begins With An International Design Competition

January 24, 1997|By Blair Kamin, Tribune Architecture Critic.

The year isn't even a month old, but it's already clear that one of its major architectural events will take place in Chicago: an international design competition for a new campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The prospect of such a building, which would provide a new focal point for a campus planned by master modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, already is stirring talk in Chicago's architectural community. No one, it seems, wants to be left off the list of candidates for this plum job--which undoubtedly means there will be more than a little Chicago-style politicking between now and early spring, when the list of competitors is to be announced.

"Everyone wants to be on the list, including myself," said Chicago architect Dirk Lohan, Mies' grandson, who proposed the competition and who last year completed a new master plan for the campus. The center would be IIT's first new building on its South Side campus in more than 25 years.

In November, Chicago billionaires Jay and Robert Pritzker, along with Robert W. Galvin, chairman of the executive committee of Motorola, announced $120 million in donations to IIT. The money, along with matching donations, will help fund the campus center, expected to cost between $25 million and $30 million. It also will go for new student and faculty housing, hiring more teachers and funding more scholarships.

The campus center, which would be open to students, faculty and staff, is to be built next to the elevated tracks along State Street on a long, narrow site now occupied by a parking lot between 32nd and 33rd Streets. Mies' renowned temple of steel and glass, Crown Hall, which houses IIT's College of Architecture, is one block south across State. Though noisy, the site is thought to provide a centrally located meeting place, between academic buildings west of the tracks and student housing to the east. In contrast, the current student center, the Hermann Union Building, near the campus' west end, is thought to be out of the way by many of the approximately 1,000 students, both graduate and undergraduate, who live east of the tracks.

David Baker, the university's vice president of external affairs, said the competition has the full support of IIT President Lew Collens.

"We want to create a world-class building, both architecturally and in terms of design to serve our entire campus," Baker said. "The institution has suffered for a long time for not having a campus center that works."

As currently envisioned, the competition would be by invitation only and is expected to be limited to a range of designers whose work fits the category of modern architecture, an enormously influential, still-evolving style best known for its abstract essays in steel, glass and concrete.

About 40 architects from around the world would be expected to participate. Stressing that nothing is set in stone, Baker and Donna Robertson, the new dean of IIT's College of Architecture, maintain that this format would make the event more manageable and affordable, while remaining true to the heritage of Mies.

Call for open competition

But others, including Chicago architects who were upset that none of their ranks were among the finalists chosen to design the city's recently completed Museum of Contemporary Art, are urging a competition that would be open to everyone, similar to the 1981 contest won by Yale University undergraduate Maya Lin for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It attracted more than 1,400 entries.

"To me, this is a competition where they want to feel comfortable with pretty big names rather than having somebody coming out of nowhere," said G. Stanley Collyer, editor in chief of Competitions, a Louisville magazine whose main focus is design contests. "A guy who lives in an attic on Wabash is not going to make it."

Chicago architect Laurence Booth expressed enthusiasm for the idea of a competition devoted primarily to architecture, in contrast to the contest for the Harold Washington Library Center, which involved teams of architects and developers and therefore focused as much on cost issues as on design. But he, too, questioned limiting the competition to modernists.

"I would be against this initial preconception," Booth said. "If you're interested in advancing architecture and you're going to exclude people who don't fit your particular enthusiasm of the moment, then it isn't as creative as it ought to be."

Coincidentally, the competition would be held exactly 75 years after the international design contest for Tribune Tower, which drew 263 entries from 23 countries and resulted in the construction of a neo-Gothic skyscraper at 435 N. Michigan Ave. The Tribune contest, one of the most significant in architectural history, was an open competition that drew a wide range of styles, both modern and traditional.